How did you sync? Did you let it auto sync by audio? If so, I'd be curious if it would be faster to find a sync point and sync by markers, or if it still does some audio analysis for syncing in the background.

Yes I highlighted each clip in the browser and told it to make a multi clip. There are long presentations, so it would be easier to just let them sync instead of creating markers. That's especially true with the PowerPoint slides that also have audio.

I have no idea if it's normal. I've never done a multicam with clips that long. If you have a few cameras that are each the full 90 minutes, you might manually sync those first since that would probably be faster. Then open the multicam and add all the powerpoint files with audio and let it do the audio sync for those. That way it's not processing and analysing the audio for so many super long clips.

Maybe Jeremy Garchow will chime in - he's a smart dude who knows the software really well, and I think he's done a fair bit of multicam. He might be able to shed some light on it.

Hi Michael, When you say "manually sync those first since that would probably be faster. Then open the multicam and add all the powerpoint files with audio and let it do the audio sync for those." I'm not sure what you mean.

Can you explain that to me step by step?

Would I first sync the 2 videos files? Cam1 and Cam2? then sync the PowerPoint footage (which really acts as camera 3) to that multiclip created with the Cam 1 & 2 Multicam?

I'll try to explain it from memory - I'm actually on Premiere Pro now and haven't worked in FCPX in a few months, so I don't have an ability to actually open the software to make sure I'm giving you 100% accurate step-by-step info.

I'm assuming the wide and tight cameras are all one clip - that is, the cameras started rolling at the beginning of the presentation and shut off at the end.

If they are, scrub into them a bit and look for a decent sync point between them and set a marker on that point for each camera. This is what I'm calling a manual sync. Then select the wide and tight and make a multicam clip and choose to sync by the marker. This should very quickly create a multicam clip that you can scrub through to check sync. If it's off by just a bit, right click the multicam and choose to open in angle editor (or something like that) and nudge one of the cameras left/right as necessary to get them in sync.

I recommend doing this because it should be faster than having FCPX analyse all 90 minutes of audio and sync it for you after 4 hours, assuming the wide and tight shots are one clip each.

Once you have the wide and tight synced, open the multicam clip and do this:

Basically, add an angle, drop in your powerpoint footage, and sync it to the the wide or tight. You can sync it by audio here, if the powerpoint slides are a bunch of clips. If the Atomos recording is one long clip you could manually sync it to, which might be even faster.

I'd say it's worth a shot trying it just to see if it's faster, although it does mean more manual work for you.

Also, you asked if there was any issue with renaming clips in the browser. Short answer, no. It's just metadata. But I prefer to add custom names in the Comment column or Scene/Take so that I always have the original clip name to reference, in case I need it.

"Some audio recordings are not suited for use with this feature. Selecting this option may result in long processing times"

To expedite this the article suggests:

"First Marker on the Angle: Final Cut Pro uses the first marker in each angle as the sync point....you can use the first marker to define a region that can be fine-tuned with the “Use audio for synchronization” option (described above). In other words, you don’t need to place the marker exactly—just close enough so that the automatic audio sync feature can sync the angles the rest of the way."

BTW: the issue being, that if you use audio sync ONLY, then you're telling Final Cut to "listen" to each clip in its entirety and figure out how and where they sync up. Obviously not a good idea when the clips are that long. As the manual states, by setting even just rough markers in each clip around the same spot tells FC to "listen around this area", not the entire clip.

[Greg Ball]"90-minute presentations with 3 cameras. 2 angles are the presenter wide and tight shots, and the third is an Atmos recording of the PowerPoint slides. All video is 1920 X 1080P 29.97 frames per second.

I'm trying to synchronize the angles, and it's taking forever. Is this normal? Any way to speed this up?"

Another option is use Tentacle sync devices. My doc team uses these frequently and they work very well. I just synced a 3-hr-long six-camera 4k shoot using Tentacle and it took a few seconds, despite most of the cameras shooting stop/start: https://tentaclesync.com